Repeated Failures in the Management of High Risk Technologies

The role of organizational factors in achieving reliability in the design and manufacture of subsea equipment

“…Thus, relative to more hierarchical structures, jobs are less specialized and more complex, necessitating technically qualified, self‐motivated employees. In contrast to a culture that promotes reliability, a maladaptive or dysfunctional culture has a negative impact on performance; for example, the culture at NASA (which led decision makers to ignore key evidence and overestimate component reliability) has been identified as a root cause of the Challenger and Columbia disasters (Heimann, 2005; Resnick, 2005; Sadeh, 2006; Wong, Desai, Madsen, Roberts, & Ciavarelli, 2005).…”

“…However, in other organizational contexts, lessons learned by researchers and reliability specialists offer some understanding of how organizational culture, structure, and associated processes influence reliability. In particular, from the point of view of creating a high‐reliability organizational culture, subsea engineering has much in common with aviation and space technology, including satellite deployment and space exploration (e.g., Heimann, 2005; Sadeh, 2006). In each case, opportunities for correcting faults that occur in service are very limited, and postdeployment access or asset retrieval (if possible at all) requires costly technical resources.…”

Learning from disasters

“…Other values, such as health, environment, and effi ciency, will be advocated for from within and from outside the system. Tradeoffs between risk and effi ciencies are well-described in the literature [10], [11], [17], [21]. Decision-makers have to make such tradeoffs, balancing a variety of different values.…”

Applying Safety Science to Genetically Modified Agriculture

“…The efforts to appear transparent and open to criticism is seen as pumping a lot of energy, at the expense of vigilant but sober safety management (Perrow, 1999: 366-368;Nichols & Wildavsky, 1987). From a different angle, Heimann (2005) is also weighing in on this issue. He suggests that the efforts a company puts into restoring safety after a big accident lead to an almost "fatal" drift towards type II risk -a waste of resources -which will "naturally" lead to safety short cuts to be able to deliver on time as expected.…”